Penn Jillette’s Deceptively Simple Rhetoric of Libertarianism

One of our intermittent tasks here on The Partially Examined Life is to try to engage with current rhetoric in popular intellectualism. Our recent episode on white privilege attempted to separate the facts involved (race disparities) from the concepts used to characterize those facts ("privilege") and from what concrete actions could be used to address the actual problems (concluding, for one, that the notion of privilege is not essential for being an activist with regard to those problems).

My attention was recently redirected to another popular and seductive set of ideas that we've dealt with in the past (most directly on our Robert Nozick episode): Libertarianism. I'm very sympathetic to Penn Jilette's presentation in this video from last summer published by Big Think, but I see significant problems with his two major claims:

Since governance is ultimately founded on the threat of violence, the government should only exert its power regarding those things that we would ourselves defend with a gun.

The short answer to claim (1) is that while yes, of course each of us is a unique conundrum with our own path to follow, and so of course the government should not, for instance, administer aptitude tests and then route each of us into the jobs most suited for us, we do know quite a few things about people in general, both with regard to our material well-being and with regard to less tangible psychological factors having to do with dignity and freedom. We know, for instance, that any system that so tested us and routed us against our will into predefined professions would be monstrous. We know that not only poverty, but the threat of poverty hovering just one lost job or medical emergency away, is oppressive. We often use the rhetoric of "rights" to talk about those things that, as a society, we've more or less agreed that people should not be subjected to, or someone claiming that there is such a right wants this kind of agreement. Jillette's formulation should lend us a sense of humility in our social engineering, but the task of social engineering itself is unavoidable: We're already being engineered by social forces, and it's much better to try to steer these for good rather than just people's lives be determined by the market or other so-called "natural" forces.

Claim (2) is much more interestingly wrong. I agree that government is ultimately founded on violence, in that as Jillette says, eventually, if you don't pay taxes or otherwise disobey laws, someone with a gun will show up at your house. I think that the "ultimately" is an important caveat here, as the degree to which force is hidden significantly alters our experience of power, as we've seen recently with the stories in the news about airline passengers being forcibly removed. Order in an elementary school, likewise, is ultimately based on physical force, in that if a student is irascible enough, staff and perhaps eventually police will remove that student from the environment, but we rely on the fact this seldom happens, that this threat is not what actually keeps students in line given the more immediate, and much more mild punishments available.

In any environment that people actually have to live in day in and day out, some control is needed. "What would I be willing to defend with a gun?" asks Jillette. Well, the obvious and humane answer is that this threat of deadly force is only justified in preventing harm, and I think the harm to be prevented should be pretty close to deadly as well (so use stun guns instead!). But think of all the ways that someone could clearly abuse a shared environment that fall short of physical harm. Theft, for one: the notion of private property barely survives Jillette's thought experiment. Sure, I'd (in theory, if there was no police) use a gun to defend the possessions I need (and others I care about need) to survive, as that's an extension of protecting myself and others from harm, and of course there's that whole principle of "if I let them take my chicken, they'll know I'm vulnerable and will next take my child." But do we really not have the legitimate power, through majority rule with rights enforced to protect minorities, to prevent the public space from being littered with crap?

As with the elementary school, the character of the incentives is important in determining concretely whether we feel ourselves to live in a just, free society. If you engage in commerce, you're entering into a public space, and it's in all of our interests to not have a "let the buyer beware" atmosphere, to make sure that doctors and lawyers and other people who are allegedly protecting our interests really have the ability to do so without us each having to individually investigate our potential trading partners. If someone violates these kind of professional and economic regulations, the first repercussion is not a SWAT team showing up at your house and killing your dog. It's a fine, a warning, a lawsuit, disbarment or other profession-specific ostracism. The same goes for failing to pay your taxes. In all cases, it's only if you're seriously irascible, again, that the cops get called into it.

We would all like in theory to be fully free from that threat of the cops, and we should always keep in mind exactly how horrible it is for someone to actually be arrested, jailed, threatened with deadly force, and remain humble and, let's say for lack of a better word, conservative in what actions we'd like to be prohibited with such a threat. But even Jillette admits that taxes, for one, are needed, at least to fund the military/police/emergency services, and so we already have that experience in place for people whereby they're required to pay taxes, and if they don't, they'll eventually go to jail. This experience does not change one bit if you use those taxes to pay for a lot of other things including schools, libraries, roads, medical subsidies, anti-poverty programs, etc. etc. etc. Being in a society means that there are limits on freedom, and it's up to us as a deliberative body to argue piecemeal over every proposed tax and expenditure. Libertarianism as Penn describes it claims to offer principles that relieve us from having to actually think through specific, complicated cost-benefit scenarios, but there is no philosophy that can deliver us from thinking.

Comments

I love Penn. I think he’s witty and thoughtful. With that said, I think you identify the limitation of his argument here and in so doing you uncover a primary modus of the Libertarian argument. “Deceptively simple” is probably a good description of libertarianism as a whole. Foundationally, L’s take the idea of personal liberty and elevate it above all other values of a liberal democratic society; justice, equality, order, security, etc. In so doing, their argument ignores and delegitimizes these other values compared to liberty and the logical result is anarchism. Anything less than anarchy betrays the tenets of the philosophy.

re #2. That ultimately may disguise other motivations. Children want to please their teacher because of attachment, liking and so on – not because they think armed police are going to come and get them if they misbehave.

Maybe this is too simple, but it seems as if this response to libertarianism is just to say that 1) Governments already exist and injustices already exist, and so why not use the existing systems to fix them. I don’t think that libertarians would argue against this approach. The only question is that should we grow or shrink the scope of government to address these already existing injustices. This may be the only difference on #1.

For 2), I agree that governments don’t only use guns. Because they have a legitimate threat of violence behind their actions, they don’t always need use guns to invoke action. However, Jillette’s point is that this threat of violence is inherently behind all government action, regardless of whether they explicitly use a gun. In addition, when we give governments the power of violence, they are not infallable. Swat teams will go to the wrong house. Cops will shoot innocent people that they swore under oath to protect. When we create rules that empower the state to use force, we should question whether the erradication of certain offenses is worth the cost of accidental violence.

I think most moral people would agree with this way if thinking. Some people choose to call themselves libertarians, and other don’t like to associate themselves with that word.

I think you could extend it further, and this is why I personally fell away from Libertarianism, through a rights-based framework by saying a minarchical government [That is to say a Nozickian State] does not do enough to adequately secure the rights of its citizens. This sort of gets into Berlin’s issue of the distinction between having theoretical rights and actually having the capacity to use them. I think the issue, at least from my anecdotal experience with Libertarians, is that they focus on formal oppression, abuse or misuse of legal authority, at the expense of informal oppression which results from differences in socioeconomic capital. I think the principle fear of Libertarians is empowering any one group to define rather nebulous things such as socioeconomic advantage, and I honestly don’t have a particularly good answer other than what the author argued about how the state is already necessarily embedded in society, and vice versa. So yeah, as Mark said, it’s an ongoing debate about how much the state should be involved in the social space, which I believe Libertarians should participate in, but not with dogmatic formulations.

I’ll be blogging my full response. But I can tell you my quick-and-dirty reaction: Mark’s conclusion, his final sentence, is absurd; if you really think it a killer point, you do not understand libertarianism, its aim, method or even general perspective.

More later. I thank you for taking the trouble to address Penn’s point. Penn is an eloquent defender of a simple view of freedom that I admire, but do not quite agree with. I see complexities….

I am a great fan of the show and have learned a lot from you. I am also a libertarian (apparently an extreme minority in your audience), so please allow me to respond. To me the piece reads as if it was intended for people who already agree with it. There is little in the way of evidence or argument to back up the claims. Or, alternatively, the claims are so broad they could be used to justify arrangements I’m sure Mark would find unacceptable.

For example, regarding Jilette’s first point that “we do not know what’s best for other people,” it is pointed out that we know a lot about people in general. I suppose that is true but is it sufficient to give a central authority the ability to make decisions that potentially affect everyone? It would be a good thing in general if people ate more broccoli. Should we require people to eat more broccoli? How would you decide what is really best for people?

Friederich Hayek pointed out the “knowledge problem,” the reality that the data necessary to make centralized decisions affecting us all is in fact widely dispersed, known only individually by all of the people. Planners like to believe they have good intentions, and they probably do in most cases, but they just don’t have the knowledge to know how their decisions will affect people individually, and there always seem to be those pesky unintended consequences. Libertarians want people to make as many decisions for themselves as possible.

It is claimed that “the task of social engineering itself is unavoidable.” Why is it unavoidable? Because otherwise it occurs without direct guidance? It is fair to believe that social engineering is *desirable*, although evidence to that effect would be welcome, but I don’t see a case that it is *unavoidable*.

It is further claimed that “…it’s much better to try to steer these [social forces] for good rather than just [let] people’s lives be determined by the market or other so-called ‘natural’ forces.” What is the basis for this claim? Do we really want governments to have that much power over our lives? It is very easy to identify cases where “steering” people’s lives (often, though not always, well intentioned) did not result in things getting “much better.” Think of every communist regime. Think of Prohibition. Think of laws banning same sex marriage. Mark points out the sense of humility that we should learn from Jilette, but it seems like we just keep going humbly forward with our social engineering.

I’ll address my objections to Mark’s response to Jilette’s second point in the next post.

My goal here was merely to respond to this simple formulation by Penn.

As my conclusion states, I have no objection to actually doing cost-benefit and effectiveness analyses on individual cases. Re. broccoli, I think the relevant case would be that if the state is already paying for or otherwise providing school lunches, then, yes, you use the best science we have about nutrition and don’t call ketchup a vegetable. And yes, we know that it’s good that kids do have lunch, which doesn’t mean that that the state has to provide it but that an analysis for whether providing it is better than not all things considered is on the table, whereas I see libertarianism as ruling out even considering such provisions due to an a priori principle that government as sole legitimate holder of force is not the answer.

I see all libertarian principles as good factors to consider: Do we really want the government to do that given all the problems with government including epistemological (Hayek’s), ethical (possibility of abuse, bringing force into the equation), and otherwise logistic. But I take this as a real question and not merely a rhetorical one to which the answer is already given in advance as “no.”

I’d be happy to elaborate. Costs are not quantifiable; they are subjective and out of sight. That is, costs are opportunity costs, or opportunities forgone. The cost to me of Option A is not simply the money outlay. It’s the subjective benefit I anticipated from pursuing my next highest ranking option. On the “unseen” nature of costs, Google Bastiat’s broken-window fallacy.

There are more problems. Even if costs were quantifiable, they can’t all be anticipated. Our ignorance and the law of unintended consequences would plague any such calculations. This is the epistemological flaw in central planning. The planner cannot intelligently plan because relevant knowledge is not concentrated and in the form of data; it is incomplete, often unarticulated, and widely dispersed. Social cost-benefit analysis is an example of what Hayek called the “pretense of knowledge.” Some utilitarians concede this and so opt for “rule utilitarianism” over “act utilitarianism.” But that’s no good because it constitutes an abandonment of utilitarianism: following the rule, not pursuing the “greatest good for the greatest number,” has become the guiding principle.

Costs and benefits, as already implied, cannot be aggregated socially to arrive at a meaningful result. It makes no sense to say that if the benefit to Person A from an intervention is N while the cost to Person B is also N, it is a wash socially. The loss to B is not offset by the benefit to A. People are not interchangeable. There is no social organism with a single hierarchy of values. (This does not make me an atomistic individualist. Rather, I am a molecular individualist, or Adamistic (as in Adam Smith) individualist, who believes human beings are social animals.)

Cost-benefit analysis is based on consequentialism or utilitarianism, which has been subjected to devastating critiques over many years. Why do consequences trump rights? Do ends justify means?

Thank you again for your thoughtful response and elaboration. You’ve definitely given me more food for thought (….but due to time constraints, I unfortunately won’t have the time to consider much of your response at a deeper level…at least for the time being).

That said, I do want to make a quick comment or two about your last paragraph…just as thoughts in passing.

My statement with regard to the claim that rights in themselves are (sometimes just) claims protected by liability rules is based on (a partial reading of) the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on Robert Nozick’s Political Philosophy.

As I understand it (and I could of course be wrong), Nozick relies on the claim that rights in themselves are (sometimes just) claims protected by liability rules, as opposed to property rules, in order 1) to arrive at the ultra-minimal state and then 2) to progress to the minimal state – this being the case especially in terms of the formation of protective organizations. Unfortunately, it was never clear to me how Nozick justifies the shift from liability rules to property rules…and perhaps that is the critique that the author(s) of that SEP article were making (or perhaps it is just my misreading of it).

A relevant passage from the article reads:

“Nozick’s crucial move against the anarchist depends, then, on construing the claims to non-interference of agents who engage in actions that pose moderate risk to others’ rights as claims that are merely protected by liability rules. Since, they are merely protected by liability rules, those actions may be interfered with as long as those subject to that interference are duly compensated.”

Whether this is an accurate reading and/or how it figures into the larger discussion is far beyond me – though some implications might be drawn from it to the extent that it is an accurate representation of Nozick’s thought…at the very least, it would seem to be worth noting.

Yes, I would agree that (coercive) paternalism poses *massive* risks and is generally unpalatable – though it is perhaps possible within a liability rules framework. Consequently, I made the suggestion that deliberative processes be engaged in *and* that the inclusion of all relevant stakeholders be made necessary…such practices might mitigate/negate to some degree some of the worst aspects of paternalism, even if such paternalistic approaches are generally one of the least desirable options. Nonetheless, I completely agree that a healthy degree of skepticism is thoroughly warranted.

The last thing that I would like to quickly comment on is the notion that there is no “social organism.” Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe that that notion is part of the larger (Right) Libertarian outlook. At the moment, I am (unfortunately) not really prepared to respond to that notion in any meaningful way since I am wholly unfamiliar with the arguments that support that claim. That said – and if you will indulge me, I’ll nonetheless (foolishly and intuitively) respond to an argument that I have no actual understanding of.

It would seem to me that a “social organism” is as useful a fiction as the notion of an “individual,” to the extent that we purport that either one of them has any kind of inherent existence of its own. Ultimately though, they both seem to be just as equally fictitious.

(Is “society” something different from “social organism”…I’m just curious. At any rate – exchange the terms as needed to understand the general trajectory of the argument)

Is “society” different from “individuals,” or is it the same?

All potential answers to that question would seem to result in unwanted and absurd consequences (i.e., reductio ad absurdum). Likewise, if we ask if “individuals” are the same or different from “the parts” that constitute the individual, it would seem that we likewise arrive at similar absurdities. We can approach this problem from multiple angles (e.g., Buddhist arguments in terms of Selflessness/Emptiness/Suchness/Dependent Origination/Etc., Wilfrid Sellars’ presentation of the “Myth of the Given,” etc.). Does this mean that such notions as “individual” and “society” are meaningless…no, they serve certain (higher order) explanatory/descriptive roles.

Does the individual necessarily exist in some kind of pure isolation from others – Assuming that they weren’t raised by literal wolves, the answer is always no. Individuals always depend on the existence of others helping/cooperating/competing/etc. with them. Does that atom of an individual necessarily constitute some kind of molecule of human relationships? The answer would seem to necessarily be yes. Does that molecule necessarily constitute larger networks of these “molecules”? The answer would seem to (usually) be yes, except (superficially) in situations where a certain group of people live within a permanent state of isolation from all others who are not part of their (relatively small) group.

Do the choices of individuals constrain the choices of others? …Absolutely! Hence, the conditions of possibility that are realizable to those within a network are determined by the individuals who constitute it. Consequently, it would seem that network constraints are dialectically determined by individual constraints, and vice versa in an ever evolving feedback loop.

Atoms make up molecules make up larger structures (e.g., a table). They both constitute each other – there is no table without table atoms/molecules and no table atoms/molecules without the table itself.

…Now…maybe (and probably) I’m going about this all wrong, articulating mundane and tired ideas, or worse! Moreover, I am fairly positive that I am completely misguided and have missed the mark entirely, but again I thought I would throw my two cents (or maybe one cent) into the mix. Thanks again for the indulgences, information, analyses, and conversation!

I’m definitely in over my head here, going on intuition, and possibly getting lost in the weeds (and probably mixed up in the ways that I am applying these concepts), but I wonder about the sentiment that, “The loss to B is not offset by the benefit to A.”

I would want to qualify that position in terms of logical necessity.

In other words, it would seem to be the case that the statement – “The loss to B is *necessarily* not offset by the benefit to A,” is itself necessarily false as a general statement (i.e., one that lacks specificity with regard to particular subjects/agents).

For example, in some *particular/specific* cases, the loss to B *might actually be* offset by the benefit to A. In such a case, perhaps B is robbing A, and C is able to stop B from doing so through intervention N – this intervention being a violation of both A and B’s “right to non-interference.” C violates B’s right to non-interference because C prevents B from robbing A. Likewise, C violates A’s right to non-interference because C prevents A from freely choosing how to respond to the robbing done by B, thereby undermining A’s moral inviolability.

In such a situation, I am intuitively convinced that C has done the “right” thing – though I would of course be open to any arguments as to the contrary and/or how to think about it differently. Again, intuitively, I am not convinced that rights always trump considerations of personal or social well-being, as well as all notions regarding costs and benefits.

For example, I am not convinced that everyone’s right to non-interference necessarily entails that they have unrestricted freedom to use their own property to pollute the planet as they see fit while they pursue their own “idiosyncratic” version of the good. The benefit to them also imposes a cost on themselves and others, such that were all polluting actors left to continue to pollute in the same ways that they always had and/or were wont to do and were also not interfered with, then the planet itself may become uninhabitable – meaning that all polluters would have violated everyone’s right to non-interference in the sense that they decreased everyone’s welfare and utility on net without any sort of just rectification in return…this is because their actions made the planet uninhabitable and unsuitable for all human life. Personally, I think that such a situation (and perhaps others like it) requires an intervention N that is based on some kind of cost/benefit analysis and that is done by some actor(s) X in a way that puts social well-being above individual liberty.

Where you would draw the line is of course quite difficult and would require constant and regular negotiation and adjustment as per the input of the stakeholders involved.

This is all to say that, from my own naive (and perhaps confused) perspective, it seems reasonable to assert that, “The loss to B is not *necessarily* offset by the benefit to A,” meaning that in some significant cases the loss to B *is* offset by the benefit to A, and that in other cases the loss to B is *not* offset by the benefit to A.

In turn, it would seem to me that some costs and benefits *can* in fact be aggregated socially to arrive at a meaningful result, which would seem to leave open the possibility that, as I said before, social well-being can be put above individual liberty and rights in some cases.

Lastly, as just a further intuition and without any substantial philosophical underpinning, it would seem that we could take a cost/benefit analysis seriously even with the imperfect knowledge instantiated by educated predictions that take “flourishing” as a baseline. For example, if we have two tomato plants right next to each other – it may be the case that by trimming one, they then both flourish more such that we have healthier plants and more tomatoes. We might also generally think along the same lines in terms of immunizations and “herd immunity.”

In this sense, if 1) we take the view that rights in themselves are (sometimes just) claims protected by liability rules and if 2) rights are in themselves merely claims against having one’s utility or welfare on net lowered by certain interferences, then one will have no right against interferences that on net raise one’s utility or welfare. This obviously raises the specter of paternalism – and, I don’t know what to do about that; perhaps a degree degree of paternalism is acceptable to the extent that it is scientifically/”objectively” based and deliberatively determined…but idk.

…At any rate, thanks for reading this (if you did). I understand that I should probably read more about this kind of stuff so I can actually know what I’m talking about, but I also like bouncing ideas around with other people…so thanks!

Your interesting point about the offset gives me a chance to elaborate. I had in mind situations in which aggressive (rights-violating) interventions produce costs and benefits. In such cases we can’t talk about offsets. A wins, B loses. End of story. In the case you give, A violently interferes with B through robbery. Yes, stopping (interfering with ) A is a loss to A and a benefit (but not really a gain) to B, who is simply back where he started. But even here, we can’t talk about an offset — though we can talk about justice — because there is no aggregate utility, only (subjective) utility to individuals. There is no social organism. That’s what has to be kept in mind. We can’t make interpersonal comparisons of utility since utility (whatever that may be; it’s a placeholder idea) is subjective, individual, and nonquantitative. We can say A is better off and B is worse off, but we can’t say by how much.

Your point about pollution misses something important: pollution is interference — trespass — and therefore should be actionable in a property-rights context. If I dump sludge into your swimming pool, haven’t I interfered with you and the enjoyment of your property? If I spew poison into the air? Same thing.

I disagree that “rights are in themselves merely claims against having one’s utility or welfare on net lowered.” You do not have a right against having your utility lowered. If I open a business and compete with you, the value of your business may fall — but that is not a rights violation. What you have a right to is to be free from aggression, which includes people using your stuff without your okay. Thus you have no right to use force against me in order to “raise my utility.” At the least we can say that if what you have in mind would actually raise my (subjective) utility, force would not be required. Your position is a recipe for coercive paternalism. Thanks, but no thanks. Much cruelty has been inflicted in the name of “scientifically/’objectively’ based and deliberatively determined” paternalism. The progressive eugenicists like Margaret Sanger and Lord Keynes were full of good intentions, I’m sure.

Thanks for the reply, Mark. I generally agree with your identification of the issues of government power, but I wouldn’t be too quick to dismiss “no” responses to rhetorical questions. We all have principles that we regard as inviolable. Going back to the example in my second post, most of us regard forcibly taking money from a wealthy person to give to a poor person as wrong, however well intentioned. We don’t come to that conclusion as a result of a cost-benefit analysis. We just know it is stealing. The question becomes one of when is it permissible for the government to do something we regard as wrong when done by an individual. To libertarians, the base case is it is seldom permissible (never, in the case of anarchists). We place the burden on those who wish to give government such power. (I’m not trying to convince you this is the correct position. I just want you and the readers to be aware that there is a logical consistency even if you don’t like the approach or the outcome.)

The issue is that social planning is inherent in every society because any sort of government action necessarily circumscribes our ‘liberties’ that we would have in a state of anarchy. I think what Mark is getting at, and he can correct me if I’m wrong, is that it’s a sort of Loki’s Neck problem; there’s no logical point where you can go ‘this side government promotes liberty, that side government promotes tyranny’. The extent to which government plays a role in our lives, and in what ways, is something that has to be constantly negotiated. It’s fine for people to argue for there being less government, but they have to do it in a way that’s more substantial than appealing to a nebulous sense of liberty.

FWIW, I’m a pretty staunch civil libertarian, but have moved to being center-left on economic issues.

Most disappointing is the viewpoint that we don’t have to worry about state violence unless – after being fined, warned, sued or disbarred – we are “seriously irascible.” In other words, submit and you won’t be harmed. Is that really what you mean to contend?

That same argument, by the way, can be used to justify the Mafia taking control of your neighborhood. As long as you pay your “insurance” money there will be no violence. And, of course, violence is never the first step. You’ll get warnings first. Usually by guys in nice suits – so as to alter our experience of power by hiding the use of force.

Jilette’s question about what he would use a gun to achieve can be interpreted as asking what moral authority we have as individuals. Society would generally accept our using a gun to defend ourselves or other innocent people from harm. On the other hand, most people would not regard it as acceptable to use a gun to force a rich person to give money to a homeless person…or to build a library.

That leads to the question of what moral authority the government has. How can it be acceptable for the government to do something that would be unacceptable for an individual to do? This topic obviously leads to complex philosophical arguments but at the least it would seem that the burden of justification should be on those proposing to give government such power and not on those of us who prefer not to be threatened (however well hidden) with violence.

Lastly, I’m not sure where the claim comes from that “libertarianism claims to offer principles that relieve us from having to actually think through specific, complicated cost-benefit scenarios.” I’m not aware of any reputable libertarian who doesn’t regularly engage in rigorous thought and analysis. The comment comes across as a cheap ad hominem and I would have expected better.

The last sentence was meant to sum up the argument; I’ve edited it to read “Libertarianism as Penn describes it…”

Yes, if you don’t believe that government is or can be actually representative, then a comparison the mafia would work. I don’t believe that sort of pessimism is justified a priori but understand folks like Penn who think that this is not at all a priori but a repeatedly demonstrated fact (i.e. his claim that all intervention just ends up feeding the rich who have corrupted the system).

I think the Libertarian perspective is that generally politicians are ‘political entrepreneurs’ who ‘sell’ policies to the people in exchange for votes and ultimately political power. Thus the expansion of state power is, at the very least, not only in some professed interest in the public good, but also in their own self-interest as wielders of political power. Personally, I think there’s something to having some skepticism about the nature of state power, but I think for Libertarians it manifests as much as anti-democratic disdain for the hoi polloi as much as it is weariness towards bureaucrats and politicians..

“Political Entrepreneurship’ is something I shamelessly appropriated from Downs’ theory on political parties [I’m a Poli Sci Major], but I think its a good way of understanding why Libertarians have such disdain for the political process in general.

It seems to me to be a very transnational perspective; people do things because they expect to benefit from it. That’s why, especially among more pro-Capitalism Libertarians, businesses are so well liked; they create a product and sell it to the public, and whether it lives or dies is dependent on how well they can sell it and how well they can accumulate capital. In contrast, politicians are able to cultivate aggregate interests that can then be rewarded through mechanisms of appropriations no corporation could dream of. Needless to say, they’re pretty skeptical of the idea of a public good.

I keep returning to Right Libertarianism because, at a purely intuitive level, it just doesn’t sit well with me.

In my attempts to dig deeper into my own intuitive dissatisfaction, I have run across compelling arguments that question Nozick’s Libertarian Entitlement Theory vis-a-vis his sequential formulation of 1) Just (Initial) Acquisition, 2) Just Transfer, and 3) Just Rectification (of an Unjust Transfer).

These types of arguments would seem to undo the supposedly Just foundational rationales that establish Nozickian Libertarianism. In a highly abbreviated sense, because no Just (Initial) Acquisitions can ever actually and exhaustively be established due to the fog of history, impossibility of determination, and/or absence of evidence, then no Just Rectification can likewise be established. It would seem that the proposed foundation of Justice/Negative Liberty upon which the Libertarianism of the Nozickian/Jillettian variety is established is nothing more than an impossible mire of quicksand. I am sure that there are counter-arguments that might mitigate these critiques, but I found them compelling and have enjoyed at least investigating the arguments put forth by Right Libertarianism and the subsequent critiques and counter-critiques thereof. Thank you to PEL and its community in these regards!

At the risk of flooding the PEL comment section with an unwarranted excess, I feel that it is worth sharing a relevant portion of the essay, “The Tables Turned: Wilt Chamberlain versus Robert Nozick on recitification,” by Adam James Tebble.

First, make note of Tebble’s b’) which states, “To each according to their being no worse off at [time](R) than they would have been had any injustice against them not taken place.”

Tebble goes on to say:

“In Nozick’s system, then, one could never ascertain how much compensation should be given even if actually working out what a victim would otherwise have chosen to do and how much he would otherwise have got for those choices presented no problems. The reason for this is that the attempted reconstruction of the past will fall afoul of the same problem as the attempted construction of the present. Just as we are located within a present-day web of choice dynamically unfolding in the present we would also be located within a web of subjunctive choice in which individual choices we attempt to reconstruct were at least in part determined by the subjunctive choices of others. Like the present-day web of choice, this subjunctive web in turn determines the value of those subjunctive choices. Further, just as deviations from present-day patterns are cumulative, the longer rectification is left the more havoc the subjunctive web ‘grows’ and plays irremediable havoc with the [Utopian Rectification Authority]’s attempt to effectively calculate subjunctive levels of well-being. As Litan writes, ‘the errors would be multiplicative, growing to enormous levels over time.’ It is requirement b’) and, in particular, the No Net Harm Criterion that nests in it, which makes Nozickian justice in rectification so vulnerable to the Instrumental Wilt Chamberlain Argument. As such, it is defeated by the force of Nozick’s own critique of patterned theories of justice. Despite his expectation that present-day liberties will upset present-day patterns Nozick failed to realise [sic] that subjunctive liberties equally would upset the reconstruction of subjunctive patterns for comparative purposes. For people choosing also means, people subjunctively choosing and, as we have seen, it is impossible to know how they would have subjunctively chosen unless we can simultaneously know how they all would have chosen. Each individual subjunctive choice has the power to effect subjunctive distributional transformations thus making the attempt to calculate morally adequate levels of compensation, in Wolff’s words, ‘mind-boggling’.”

“Thus, the Instrumental Wilt Chamberlain argument not only shows why present-day patterns are impossible to achieve, it also shows why retroactive principles of justice such as Nozick’s are impossible to achieve. Whilst not demanding aggregate knowledge of patterns in the dynamically-unfolding present, they would demand knowledge of subjunctive patterns – of which there are an infinitely large number – as a necessary part of the subjunctive reconstruction of the past by the rectifying authority. Both demands are impossible to satisfy. Further, given the ‘inductive nature of the definition of entitlement’ the edifice of the theory collapses if justice in rectification can be shown to be in principle unworkable. The principle of rectification deals the Entitlement Theory a fatal blow.”

This is at least Tebble’s contention. I would refer interested parties to the full essay where Tebble addresses relevant possible objections to his argument.

[…] What has often been envisioned of late (the bit that comes to mind is the latter part of the Penn Jillette video I've previously blogged about) is an actual debate on issues between leaders, with, you know, fully spelled-out reasons instead […]

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